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But an anti-porn crusader says Mitt Romney has vowed if he’s elected president, he’ll ramp up obscenity prosecutions, a task President Obama has shown little interest in pursuing.

According to Patrick Trueman, who ran the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the Department of Justice under President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush and who now runs Morality in Media, an anti-porn organization, Romney intends to launch a war on porn.

In a meeting with Alex Wong, Romney’s foreign and legal policy director, Trueman says Wong told him, “Romney is sincere about this. He’s convinced this has now had a terrible effect on society, and he will enforce the law.”

And that means pornographers like Stagliano could become targets once again.

“I don’t really want to go to jail,” Stagliano says. “I’ve got a two-year-old son. And I have a daughter, as well. I don’t think she’d like that either.”

In 2007, Romney swore that if he were elected president, he would put a porn filter on every computer.

As Stagliano, a Libertarian who plans to vote for Gary Johnson, sees it, an administration that seeks to legislate its constituents’ morality is the real threat.

“My morality would be based on, as long as you don’t harm somebody, anything should be permitted,” Stagliano tells me. “The government can’t solve our problems.”

As Trueman sees it, porn is a scourge, and the current status is “pandemic.”

“When I was at the Department of Justice, we were vigorously prosecuting this, and the reason why is because people were demanding it,” he recalls.

Today, porn is ubiquitous, and “The nature of today’s pornographers have changed,” Trueman says. “What you’ve got are the white collar pornographers. These companies know there’s hundreds of millions to be made.”

X-rated content has proved lucrative for big businesses like hotel chains not typically associated with porn. In his bid for the presidential seat, Romney resigned from the board of the Marriott hotel chain, with which he has close ties, and Marriott has announced its intention to phase out adult content.

“You’ll never do away with all of it, but we have an untreated pandemic of harm, and you have to do something about it,” he pronounces.

Ask Santa Monica-based Roger Diamond what he thinks of devoting more government dollars to obscenity prosecutions, and he’ll tell you, “Oh, that’s really a waste of money.”

For the last five years, Diamond has represented Ira Isaacs, a Los Angeles-based pornographer the Bush administration’s now-disbanded Obscenity Prosecution Task Force at the DoJ indicted for distributing and producing scat and bestiality videos.

Earlier this year, Isaacs was convicted, despite his arguments, through multiple trials, that his eye-popping videos were not obscene, but art.

What it obscene?

Potter Stewart said, “I know it when I see it“; the Miller Test sought to locate it. To be found obscene, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment, a work must appeal to prurient interests according to community standards, depict sexual activity in an offensive way, and be wholly lacking in scientific, artistic, political or literary value.

Some may say Isaacs’ oeuvre is beyond the pale, but that doesn’t mean he should be imprisoned for it, Diamond argues.

“I find it personally offensive,” Diamond confesses when I ask him what he thinks of Isaacs’ movies, “but I think people have the right to produce it and watch it. I think that’s essential to our freedom.”

Not only do obscenity prosecutions squander resources, “It would also put a chill in Southern California,” Diamond says. “The economy in Southern California is based in a large part on the adult film industry. They employ a lot of people.”

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I must say, I do not support porn at and all and am very against it, but being female I’m glad it’s in existence for men who need it. I’m very worried about what will happen to the treatment of females in society if porn goes underground. Men will no longer have an outlet and I think that will lead to more crimes against females in public. This issue honestly scares me. I am NOT voting for Romney this fall. He can suck it.

I was going to essentially same the exact same thing as Matt before I saw his reply. While I have no qualms with porn, I think seeing it as a “necessary outlet” for men is an extremely ignorant and sexist view.

I also find your comment extremely offensive and sexist. I’m not sure if you know this, but women also watch porn. And not all porn is degrading to women. There are porn companies that are owned by women (and men) that produce so called “feminist” porn in which women are not as objectified as in other porn. But let’s be realistic and accept that women also watch porn and men don’t need porn to stop themselves from raping.

You know, you should really get a decent education on human behavior. Porn CONTRIBUTES to abusive and exploitative attitudes towards females. It desensitizes, dehumanizes, and dulls perceptions and the capacity to identify emotionally with the other human being which is reduced to an object for pure selfish pleasure. Further, you are feeding into the dangerous concept that men are just more sexual and they just cant help themselves gosh darnit. golly gee boys will be boys and if they don’t get an outlet then they are just responsible for their own actions and will revert to brainless hoardes of savages running the streets raping women because they just cant help it – they are only men- it is not their fault. UGH!!! The biggest enemy against women having equality and living in harmony are other women- because quite frankly they choose to live in ignorance and limit their vision for female potential.

Here is a news flash- women are just as sexual as men. Being more “visual” is not a male designation- it is dependent on genetics not just the gender of the person. For example I am primarily highly visual and I am a female.

Do your research please and quit speaking for women who actually are smart enough to know better. That honestly is the minority of women most women don’t do the gender justice (even though they think they do), lemme guess you read a lot of Cosmo and watch Oprah?

I’ll tell you how. With the SCOTUS. Three of them are getting old and could possibly retire/die within the next four years. We all know that the Koch Brothers have had Justices Scalia and Thomas (see NY “Times article Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead” Oct 2010) attend secretive events. Seems to me that if they want this to happen, this is the time to strike and make it stick. It would take decades to “normalize” the SCOTUS if this happens.

Banning porn is just one small piece of the GOP agenda, well, more specifically the agenda of the radical religious right, which I guess since the GOP won’t ditch them, they are one and the same for now.

This is all about a much larger agenda of cramming their morality down our throats. A very prudish, centuries-old Victorian morality. Anyone see the crap coming out of the so-called Values Voters summit?

“Literature being handed out at the Values Voter Summit on Friday attacks women for being “immodest” and extolled them to “go home and put some clothes on!”

In flyers and brochures on display at Values Voters, the social conservative conference where Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan spoke, an organization called Modesty Matters criticized women for dressing “immodestly” at church, and blamed women for causing men to stare lustfully at them.”

This sounds like something out of 1850. If this doesn’t scare you into voting straight Dem ticket, it should. If they get control of the supreme court, we are screwed screwed screwed!

The radical right wants the religious vote, just not the beliefs that go with it. They want control of the government but they don’t want zealots who can’t be controlled. Have you noticed that the right says they want to ban abortion, gay marriage and porn, but they’re all still here. It’s all just talk. And it works, too. Religious nuts are supporting the right, but they will find themselves on their own when they’re no longer needed. And as to the Values Voters summit, it gives us an easy way to identify all the nutcases.

Well spending the public funds for feeding children or pregnant mothers is an outrageous misuse and waste of those funds. However spending billions to spy on and attempt to regulate people’s personal proclivities. The money we already spend on drugs and incarceration of users or small time dealers will pale in comparison to what will be spent on the hunt for pornography, prostitution, masturbation, unlawful positions and everybody’s favorite sodomy. That last one incorporates a number of different versions of sex and would solve the problem of same sex marriage.

These people have sucked their pucker strings so tight, they’re going to end up doing themselves as they turn inside out.